Final Year Project Ideas

Cognitive / Neuroscience

Aversive social experience and depression

Berton et al,2006 – mice repeatedly confronted with stressful encounters with larger dominant animals, became trained to exhibit durable social avoidance – but that this learning failed to take place when BDNF was knocked out from the mesolimbic dopamine pathway, via a viral vector.

– Repeated social dominance paradigm – big mouse every day for 10 days

AAH

Group Dominance

is expertise important? – is the necessarily related to group function?

Is amiability important?

Age? Wider social dominance?

Do factors change in different gendered groups?

Older Ideas

Attractiveness Assessment

Is human male assessment of female attractiveness normally distributed as a function of male attractiveness – ie: do more attractive males perceive female attractiveness more critically; or do all males perceive it similarly and make mate selections based on a determinant of their own attractiveness matched to their partner; or is there no difference (sic)

Metrosexuality

Metrosexuality as a camouflaging heterosexual male adaptation.

Addiction

Does drug use (specifically metaamphetamine and opiate abuse) contribute to Ireland’s growing rate of suicide and depression; or are both phenomenon linked to wider issues like social inequality.

Birth Order

Are birth order theories confounded by relationship to chronology of parental sexual relationship? In EEA most children would probably have been born 9 – 12 months into parental relationship and at 12 month intervals thereafter (check with primate studies).